A Geek’s View on Part Numbers

I feel a bit geeky today. I posted about part numbers, document number and numbering few times in the past. These posts sparkled an intensive discussion about all possible and impossible data schemas, intelligent numbers and standards for part numbering. I want to give you a bit different approach to think about Part Numbers – Regular Expressions. First of all, what is that? This is how Wikipedia defines regular expressions.

In computing, a regular expression, also referred to as regex or regexp, provides a concise and flexible means for matching stringsof text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. A regular expression is written in a formal language that can be interpreted by a regular expression processor, a program that either serves as a parser generator or examines text and identifies parts that match the provided specification.

Navigate to the link to the following article – How to use regular expression to search better and save time? Take a moment of time and read it. You will find a lot of interesting tips how you can create various queries that fits your numbering models for documents and parts. The article provides good examples on how to use regular expressions and link to additional resources.

What is the conclusion? I hope you enjoyed my "geeky tips". Speaking seriously and thinking about practical aspects, regular expressions are good only when your PLM software supports them. Did you get any experience with this in the past? Can you share any examples of regular expression usage in your PDM/PLM software?

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6 Responses to A Geek’s View on Part Numbers

I remember one instance I used regular expression in a real PLM project several years ago.

Customer had a specific rules to create part descriptions based on certain characteristics of the part.
example – “attribute [Material] and related [Product family]”.
These expressions were sometimes cryptic and in order to save maintainence/programming effort .. I used regular expression to parse the expression and replace it with actual values.
This way whenever the information in the system changed the descriptions were updated.